Mimetic humanity

A student’s (Tyler Abens) paper on the theme of imitation in Paul begins with a description of experiments comparing how children learn to how monkey’s learn. The experiment indicates that, contrary to the monkey-see, monkey-do mythology, humans learn by imitation and monkeys do not. Because of this, humans don’t need to reinvent things over and over again. They can just do what earlier humans have done. Because humans imitate, they develop and progress. Monkeys have no eschatology.

We learn by mimesis, and that means that our knowledge is picked up from others, not self-discovered. And this is a central aspect of being made in the image of God. The Triune God is Three Persons who are perichoretically entwined from top to bottom. The persons are not “individuals,” but (in the Thomist description) are their relations. There is no “Father-in-himself” but only the Father as a relation to the Son and Spirit. Human beings made in the image of such a God are radically social, social and mimetic down to the roots. No amount of digging can uncover a layer of the Father’s being where He is not Father-of; no burrowing can get to a layer of human existence where I am just me and no one else.

Contrary to a thread of Christian reflection, especially in the modern age, it is not our endowment of individual traits that makes us the image of God. It’s the very absence of individual endowment.